


Diseases of Canaries

by DrJekyl



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Prison, Drabble Series, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, F/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 10:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13949697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrJekyl/pseuds/DrJekyl
Summary: Rose is dead, Pearl is back out of prison, and everything is different.





	Diseases of Canaries

There’s always a moment of disorientation, crossing the final threshold, hearing the gate close behind her without so much as a ‘good luck’. Always, with that first, deep breath of free air, the relief, the terror of knowing that her life is back in her own hands. New, however, is the ankle bracelet, an ill-fitting reminder that this freedom is conditional, will be for the next four years. New, as well, her greeting at the gate: Garnet, stoic, not smiling; Amethyst, silent, shoulders hunched, eyes dark.

No Rose.

At least they’d the sense to not bring Greg or the boy.

* * *

Too much time in solitary, the harsh, omnipresent lighting, has destroyed her internal clock along with her vision. Three am finds her lying flat on her back on a too-soft bed, her every sense straining against the night for danger the darkness won’t bring, here. Her hands itch, empty. The house creaks around her, timber protesting the wind, sun-baked brick pinging-cooling as it radiates heat into the night. Rose’s picture at her bedside, more uncomfortable than the gaze of any guard.

At four am, she rises, makes her bed, and sits at the window, waiting to watch the sun rise.

* * *

Her day starts at six, with breakfast.

But it takes nearly thirty minutes to overcome the ingrained inertia of _waiting_ to go downstairs and make it herself, fumbling with the pan and the cutlery drawer and trying to remember just how she likes her eggs. The others are still abed; the oven’s electric, and she leaves them plates within it.

Her allotted hour in the exercise pen was nine, but it wasn’t uncommon for it to slip back, slide forward. Here she lets herself outside at seven, to Rose’s greenhouse to weed everything else that has died in her absence.

* * *

“So, are we just… _not_ gonna talk about it?” Amethyst demands over dinner. Steak, greens and mashed potatoes; Pearl eats without looking any of it.

“There’s nothing to say,” Garnet says.

“ _Nothing_ to _say_?!” Amethyst’s hands rattle the table. “She goes and gets herself banged up again and leaves _us_ to deal with _everything_? With _Rose_ _dying_?”

Pearl had trained herself to defend by attacking, long before her first incarceration. Prison merely honed that developed instinct. Violence is - _was_ the only ‘no’ too many of her fellow inmates understood; no amount of exercise would ever make her look like anything but an easy target. Her knuckles are scarred, two of her fingers crooked, and, right now, she holds a knife in her hand, solid and sharp as her rage.

“ _Pearl_.” Garnet’s voice rings in a warning.

The knife burns her hand. The fork too. They fall with a clatter, the chair next as she pushes herself away from the table, and then she’s standing on the back porch, hands pressed tightly over her mouth to muffle her sobbing. Inside, she can hear Amethyst’s shouting, the silences that are Garnet’s replies, and knows, in this instant, that she’s truly come home.

* * *

* * *

Pearl was twenty-two when Rose joined the office. Rose Quartz, barely eighteen, who wished she was born a decade earlier and dressed the part. Free love and mother earth and mary jane, and hours spent irritating Pearl with the supposed merits of all three instead of doing any work. Pink hair. Complaints about wearing shoes. A sports scholarship to Barnard - discus, of all things - but declined. _Declined!_ _And_ related to the boss.

Pearl hated everything about her, intensely, for two full weeks. But then Rose smiled, just _so_ , and Pearl abruptly realised why she'd never been on a date before.


End file.
